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What the Pope was really saying
These are the last four paragraphs of the Pope's speech at Regensburg. They are well worth reading as is the entire speech at the link. What is ironic is that his comments are much more of an attack on the secular West than on Islam. His quotation is from a civil dialogue between a Christian and a Muslim. It is hard to see such a dialogue taking place between either and a secularist. Coupled with the comment I posted yesterday regarding the historic context of Manuel II's comments, they reveal a Pope who sees himself located in a westward drifting position between a rock and a dessicating hard place with little affection for either. Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the worlds profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought: to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss. The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur this is the program with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. Not to act reasonably (with logos) is contrary to the nature of God, said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university. Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-09-16 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=166057 |